Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Northover]

178ZAE: Clause 95, page 73, line 39, at end insert “, and
(d) accommodation, or accommodation of a description, for the time being specified by order under section 107(1)(e) of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 (youth detention accommodation for purposes of detention and training order provisions).”

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, this is a substantial group of amendments, many of which are minor and technical. However, there are a number of substantive amendments which the Committee will be interested in and which I will go through briefly. These relate predominately to the functions of the Secretary of State and the Youth Justice Board and are set out in Clauses 95, 96 and 97.

Amendment 178ZAE expands the definition of youth detention accommodation currently set out at Clause 95(2) to include any new form of youth detention accommodation specified by the Secretary of State under Section 107(1)(e) of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000. In recent years we have seen a significant reduction in the number of young people sentenced to custody. Although the number of those remanded has not shown the same reduction, we believe that the remand proposals contained within Chapter 3 have the potential to bring about a fall in the level of secure remand to youth detention accommodation also. If this occurs, and demand on the secure estate continues to fall, this may provide further opportunities to plan and pilot new forms of youth detention accommodation. Such accommodation would be developed with the aim of improving outcomes for children and young people, and this amendment would allow it to be used to accommodate remanded young people as well as those who are detained post-sentence.

Amendment 178ZBC extends the power in Clause 96 that gives the Secretary of State the power to make arrangements with providers of secure children’s homes to accommodate remanded young people so that the Secretary of State may also make such arrangements for the use of newly specified types of accommodation.

Amendments 178ZBA and 178ZBE provide for the Secretary of State’s functions in Clauses 95 and 96 to be exercisable concurrently with the Youth Justice Board. That is, both the Secretary of State and the YJB may exercise the power. They also allow the Secretary of State by order to provide that these functions should be exercisable solely by him or her. This order-making power is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, as set out in Amendment 178ZBG.

In tabling these substantive amendments, the Government have responded to Parliament’s decision not to abolish the Youth Justice Board. These amendments ensure that the Youth Justice Board can continue to carry out its placement and estate management functions in relation to remanded young people. These amendments also provide a concurrent power, with the Secretary of State, for the Youth Justice Board to make payments to and recover costs from local authorities. Payments will be made to local authorities to enable them to take on greater financial responsibility for the costs of secure remand and to invest to help ensure that remands to custody occur only when appropriate. The clear intent is that this funding will be used only for the provision of youth justice services.

The last set of substantive amendments in this group, Amendments 178ZBJ, 178ZBK, 178ZBL and178ZBM, amend the test set out in Section 3AA of the Bail Act 1976 that a court must apply when deciding whether it may impose electronic monitoring on a child or young person as a condition of their bail. The amendments allow for imprisonable offences committed by a child or young person while remanded in custody under existing provisions or remanded in youth detention accommodation under the provisions of the Bill to be taken into account by the court when determining whether a child or young person has a history of offending. This change is consistent with the equivalent condition in Clause 87 relating to electronic monitoring of a child remanded to local authority accommodation.

Amendments 178ZBB, 178ZBH, 178ZBN, 178ZBP, 178ZBQ and 178ZBR are minor and technical amendments associated with the provisions in Chapter 3.

I should mention that we will arrange for the letter that my noble friend Lord McNally recently sent to all Peers regarding the Government’s youth justice amendments, to which I referred earlier, to be placed in the House Libraries. I beg to move.